In his book Ambling Into History: The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni asked: “You want to run for president? Here’s what you need to do: Have someone write you a lovely speech that stakes out popular positions in unwavering language and less popular positions in fuzzier terms. Better yet, if it bows to God and country at every turn — that’s called uplift. Make it rife with optimism, a trumpet blast not just about morning in America but about a perpetual dazzling dawn. Avoid talk of hard choices and daunting challenges; nobody wants those. Nod to people on all points of the political spectrum ... Add a soupcon of alliteration. Sprinkle with a few personal observations or stories — it humanizes you. Stir with enthusiasm.”
So it was at the beginning of the year, as the Republicans competed to see who could paint the gloomiest picture of US President Barack Obama’s America, that the president reached back for the signature theme of his 2008 campaign: hope. Seeking to channel former US president Ronald Reagan’s re-election theme of 1984, when the nation was emerging from economic crisis, he used his state of the union speech in January to claim “America is back.”
“Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about,” Obama said.
He test drove the phrase in a range of settings.
“I placed my bet on the American worker,” he told a union conference in Washington. “The American auto industry is back.”
A month later — in Houston, Texas, at a fundraiser — he told donors: “The recovery is accelerating. America is coming back.”
This was by no means an absurd claim. By February, there had been three straight months of employment growth; the final quarter of last year showed a spike in consumer borrowing, signaling both more consumption and more lending. Coming into spring, many felt they witnessed the green shoots of economic recovery. And, electorally, it seemed like a smart one. US voters may want politicians to reflect on their fragility, but they have never been particularly keen on them actually reflecting it. The country was emerging from two failed wars and the most severe recession since the Great Depression. Confidence in their political and financial classes was shattered; assumptions about its military supremacy were dented. According to Gallup, the last time most Americans thought they were satisfied with the direction the country was heading in was January 2004 — that stint of optimism lasted less than a week.
The Republicans were wedded to the notion that under Obama, the US was in decline. Former US senator Rick Santorum, a Republican presidential hopeful, claimed it was an election “to save the soul of America” — prompting the question, who had lost it? His Republican rival, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, insisted he had to return the nation to a day when “each of us could walk a little taller and stand a little straighter.” Obama’s message was: “Walk tall. We’re on our way.”
GOING BACKWARDS
There was only one problem: People did not believe it. In February, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research focus-grouped four different ways of framing the nation’s economic trajectory. Two concentrated on the enduring struggles of US middle-class families and two claimed recovery was under way. The two that did best argued: “This is a make-or-break time for the middle class and for all those trying to get into it.” The one that tested worst, by a considerable margin, claimed: “America is back.”
“America is not back,” veteran pollster and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research chief executive Stanley Greenberg told the New York Times. “We have long-term fundamental problems with respect to personal debt etc. If you look at our data and history, it takes a long time before job numbers translate into accepting, at a personal level, that things are better.”
Indeed, if anything, Americans felt they were going backwards. Most believe young people will have a worse life than their parents and a third think the country’s best days are behind it. It’s not difficult to see why. For 90 percent of workers, wages have been effectively stagnant for the past 40 years, while median house prices have slumped 20 percent since 2006. Over the past decade, the cost of tuition has risen 32 percent and the average healthcare premiums have rocketed by 113 percent. A report earlier this year showed that between 2007 and 2010, the median US family lost a generation of wealth. With figures like that, insisting that “America is back” sounds more like happy talk than fighting talk.
Herein lies the central dilemma for Obama’s re-election. In 2008, he ran, with considerable rhetorical force, on a promise of “hope” and “change” in the midst of an economic crisis and on his ability to bring consensus to a divided political class. However, for many, things have changed for the worse and the country is even more polarized than when he started. So the substantial benefits of his presidency are not fully apparent — particularly to those most likely to have voted for him. Meanwhile, the symbolic significance of his candidacy is largely spent. You can only be elected the first black president once. His presence remains a source of great pride to many, particularly black Americans and the young. People will still travel halfway across the country to hear him speak and hawkers still sell T-shirts at his events.
However, this time he is not standing on his promise but on his record.
Shortly after his inauguration, he told NBC: “Look, I’m at the start of my administration. One nice thing about the situation I find myself in is that I will be held accountable. You know, I’ve got four years. And, you know, a year from now I think people are going to see that we’re starting to make some progress, but there’s still going to be some pain out there. If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition.”
The pain is still out there and that is precisely the proposition the Republicans are making.
There are several ways Obama can counter this. When he was running, few understood the depth of the economic crisis or could have predicted the implosion of the eurozone and the subsequent drag on the world economy. Roughly two thirds of the country blame Bush for the state of the economy, more than those who hold Obama responsible. Republicans have been both obdurate and obtuse in Congress, where approval ratings have rarely scraped 20 percent. The trouble is that, to a skeptical ear, these sound more like justifications for why he has failed to deliver than explanations as to how he might succeed if given more time.
‘IT’S THE ECONOMY’
Stewardship of the economy is the one area where Romney generally outpolls him. It is also by far the most important issue in the election. In all of the nine states he won from Republicans last time, Obama’s approval ratings are below 50 percent; in six, they are 45 percent or less. Unemployment is higher in six of them today than it was when he was inaugurated in 2009. In the midterms, Republicans took more than 20 percent of the House seats from Democrats in those states. His defeat is not just plausible, it is possible. Indeed, given all the metrics of unemployment, approval ratings and real disposable personal income growth per capita, he should lose.
“If the economy is doing great, then any leader looks great,” said Charlie Cook, one of Washington’s premier electoral analysts. “And if the economy is doing lousy, I think almost any leader looks bad.”
The day the Democratic convention started, earlier this month, a poll showed that most Americans believe that the country is worse off than it was when Obama was nominated four years ago and that he does not deserve a second term. The day after it ended, the US Treasury released a jobs report signaling a feeble recovery that is close to stalling.
The problem is not that Obama doesn’t have a record. He can point to significant achievements that would — or should — satisfy his base and arguably credit him with the most progressive term since Lyndon Johnson. He has appointed two women — including the first Latin American — to the Supreme Court; implemented a version of healthcare reform; ended don’t-ask-don’t-tell in the military; withdrawn combat troops from Iraq and presented a timetable for withdrawal for troops from Afghanistan. He had Osama bin Laden assassinated and the US’ standing in the world has greatly improved since he took over among both allies and enemies alike.
The problem is that the record he has does not include the single most important achievement he could hope for — improving the economic lot of the broad swath of middle America. And the various things it does include do not add up to a narrative. (It does not help that the main advantages to his principal achievement, healthcare, do not kick in for another two years.) This was evident at the Democratic convention, where the same list of Obama’s achievements (the Lily Leadbetter Act, which protects equal pay for equal work for women; the repeal of don’t-ask-don’t-tell; bin Laden’s assassination; healthcare; his executive order on young immigrants) were aired each night, less as a theme than an incantation.
It is a flaw best illustrated in US Vice President Joe Biden’s claim to donors in Texas that: “The best way to sum up the job the president has done ... is Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.”
Among other problems, such a summary links a single military operation and a particular economic achievement, both of which mark progress that is both episodic and partial. A counter summary could just as easily read: “Al-Qaeda is alive and the economy is dying.” Moreover, it falls well short of “America is back” (which is what people want to hear), let alone “hope” and “change” (which is what they heard last time).
A ‘WOODEN’ RIVAL
The greatest case for Obama’s presidency so far can be summed up thus: Things were terrible when I came to power, are much better than they would have been were I not in power and will deteriorate if I am removed from power. Even if one accepts these claims as true and understands them as important, they are a long way from the uplifting message of four years ago. Not so much “Yes we can” as “Could be worse.”
It is rare for a president to recover from this level of protracted economic distress, particularly when they brought such high hopes with them. However, the past year handed Obama two crucial, mutually reinforcing tools with which he could start to build an electoral revival. The first was Occupy Wall Street, which sprouted offshoots in every state in the country, burning brightly before fading into smaller, more grassroots campaigns. The occupations had no specific demands and had no organic connection to the Democratic Party, but by concentrating their ire on the inequities of the financial system and the greed of financial elites — two things Obama had failed to do anything about — they shifted the target of national frustration from government to inequality.
The second gift has been Romney: a wooden candidate whose personal wealth amounts to double the combined wealth of the last eight presidents going back to Richard Nixon and yet who only pays 14 percent tax. For if Occupy Wall Street reframed the debate, then it also provided the basis to frame Romney as an out-of-touch magnate with a tin ear for the travails of the common person. Most of the Democratic attacks over the summer, regarding outsourcings and firings at Bain Capital, which Romney once ran, their demands for his tax records, or questions about his wealthy donors, fit that mold. This rich guy doesn’t understand you or what you’re going through, and now he wants to buy the election.
By contrast, Obama has put his less fortunate roots front and center, running not on a narrative of racial breakthrough but of class mobility. “Barack knows the American Dream because he’s lived it,” Michelle Obama said in her convention speech. “And he wants everyone in this country to have that same opportunity, no matter who we are, or where we’re from, or what we look like, or who we love.”
Herein lies the central strategy of the Obama campaign: not to lift people with lofty rhetoric, but hit them with a hard choice between him and Romney and characterize it as a choice for either more fairness or less; for the country to go backwards or forwards; someone who understands you or someone who does not. That tactic seems to be paying off.
VOTER TURNOUT
In 2008, Obama’s victory was due, in no small part, to his ability to expand the electorate by attracting constituencies that had previously been underrepresented at the polls — particularly black people, young people and Latinos. He did not just win them by huge margins; he also managed to amplify their electoral clout by motivating them to turn out in huge numbers. However, those are the very groups that have suffered most under his presidency. Unemployment for 18-to-19-year-olds is 23.5 percent; for those 20 to 24, it’s significantly lower at 12.9 percent, but still significantly higher than the national rate of 8.2 percent. Black unemployment is at 14.1 percent — a 10 percent increase on when he was inaugurated. While Hispanic unemployment has remained constant, Obama has deported more undocumented immigrants than any president since the 1950s.
Polls show he still holds a significant advantage among all three groups, attracting 89 percent of the black vote and 60 percent of both the Latino vote and the 18-to-29 age group. The issue is less whether those people will vote for him, but how many will show up, since all three groups are less reliable voters. In fact, the black turnout is the one part of Obama’s base that remains solid: the Democrats are less certain of Latinos and the young. In a base election, enthusiasm is key. Since black, Latino and young voters are everywhere, there is not a single swing state where this is not an issue, and arguably only New Hampshire and Iowa — two of the whitest states in the US — are the only ones where it is not key. This in no small part explains his decision in June to halt the deportation of thousands of young undocumented immigrants — something he could have done at any time during his presidency. In an executive order, he ruled that young immigrants who arrived in the US illegally before the age of 16 and spent at least five continuous years there would be allowed to stay and apply for work permits if they had no criminal history and met other criteria, such as graduating from high school or serving honorably in the military.
This time he is also seeking to make inroads among white women, many of whom were turned off by Republican views on abortion and contraception, and pensioners, who may be nervous about Republican plans for Medicare (both of which demographics he lost by 53-45 in 2008), and gay voters, buoyed by his support for gay marriage and motivated by Republican opposition to it. If there is any volatility in this race, it is not about the breadth of his support but the depth of it. National polls of registered voters may mostly show him with a narrow lead, but polls of likely voters often show him trailing.
The one thing that has not changed since 2008 is the Democrats’ emphasis on the “ground game”: sending volunteers out to collect information, persuade and, ultimately, ferry people to the polls. One Washington Post survey showed 20 percent of registered voters had been contacted by the Obama campaign, compared with 13 percent who had been contacted by Romney’s campaign. And Democrats had been particularly effective at reaching their base: 42 percent of Democrats said they had been contacted, as well as 24 percent non-whites and 31 percent of the people who voted for Obama last time.
“This is light years ahead of where we were in 2008,” Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said during a forum in Charlotte, North Carolina. “We are going to make 2008, on the ground, look like Jurassic Park.”
They plan to knock on more than twice as many doors and register twice as many voters as they did last time. In North Carolina, they have twice as many field offices as the Romney campaign. In Ohio, they have three times as many.
If Obama were only running against Romney, his victory would be all but assured by this stage. But he isn’t. He is running against the economy and on his promise to be a transformative president in tough times. To the extent that a second-term election is a referendum on the incumbent, Obama is losing. Too many voters think he has not done enough. However, enough voters feel he is better than his opponent. For now, at least, he is not so much “the change [they] can believe in” as the change-agent they most believe in. And while the semantic difference is minimal, the rhetorical difference could hardly be greater.
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